Rock and Roll Hall of Fame celebrates 10 years

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, May 8, 2005

CLEVELAND -- Watching perky teenager Brenda Lee croon the 1959 hit Sweet Nothin's on the big video screen at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum proves to be a revelation.

She's no rocker, you think.

Lee looks and sounds like a Wizard of Oz munchkin in a housedress mistakenly transported to this venue by time machine. But her mischievous look, teasing lyrics and swinging melody hint at the overwhelming power and passion of rock that's just around the music-timeline corner.

Seconds later, Lee fades out and the Ramones kick into view with a dated vengeance that's somehow just as innocent now as Lee's sweetness was then. They careen through the 1977 punk anthem Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.

The contrast between Brenda Lee and the Ramones, both 2002 Hall of Fame inductees, is one of many that illustrate the eclectic, roundabout journey rock has taken.

To celebrate its own journey, the Rock Hall is a co-sponsor of a 100-band music festival June 8-11 in venues throughout the city.

Todd Mesek, senior director of marketing and communications for the Rock Hall, says he believes the scope of the festival -- including a Festival Village in the Flats entertainment district — is unprecedented for the city.

The festival is the latest chapter in the saga of the 10-year-old Rock Hall's unlikely presence in Cleveland. "When it first opened, the whole world's eyes were on it," Mesek says. "The real exciting part is that no one has ever done anything like this. And the big challenge is that no one has ever done anything like this. We are an art museum, but, unlike anything else, we're a popular-culture museum. Jimi Hendrix music is blaring, and (Pink Floyd's) The Wall is playing, so it has a tremendous amount of consumer appeal."

On a quiet, chilly day last fall with a hint of sun glinting through its glass pyramid walls, the Rock Hall was populated by small groups of baby boomers studying exhibits reverently, large groups of schoolchildren rushing headlong up and down stairs obliviously and a couple of blissed-out, spiky-haired 20-something rock 'n' rollers living vicariously.

Ten years into the experiment, visitors still are transfixed by Chrissie Hynde's Akron, Ohio, high school T-shirt and scribbled lyrics, awed by Mick Jagger's concert apparel, intrigued by David Byrne's "big suit" from Stop Making Sense and Janis Joplin's psychedelic Porsche.

But there is something inherently odd about the whole concept, says Clevelander Dave Swanson of the band Rainy Day Saints, a veteran of bands Guided by Voices and Death of Samantha.

"It's a weird thing, because when you go to an art museum, you see the actual work," Swanson says. "But everybody who's a music fan owns the real work. You're going there to see trinkets. You don't go to an art museum to see a paintbrush or van Gogh's tennis shoes. But when you go to the Rock Hall, you see Jim Morrison's Boy Scout uniform or Mick Jagger's jogging shorts."

Ah, the memories

True, but those trinkets (guitars, costumes, handwritten lyrics, notes and correspondence) sure do trigger memories. It's natural to contemplate your personal history against the backdrop of the rock 'n' roll montage. And the film clips and audio snippets can feel like a soundtrack to your life, especially if you grew up in the '60s or '70s.

"You're going to tap your feet; you're going to go back to the time you were running around with your friends and doing crazy stuff," Mesek says. "We want people to have fun, we want them to dance, but we want them to learn something, too. Our job is to tell the story."

With that goal in mind, the hall's vice president of education teaches a continuing-education class at Case Western Reserve University called Rock 'n' Roll Night School. The Rock Hall itself is a source of education, tracing current styles of music back to the sources of their inspiration and following their threads into newer musical forms such as hip-hop. It's a fashion show, too, grouping stage costumes by decade.

Inductions began in 1986, nine years before the Rock Hall opened to the public. By its first anniversary, the museum had admitted 1 million visitors. When attendence waned, officials developed a store and sponsorship revenue, becoming less dependent on ticket sales.

Special exhibitions

The Rock Hall stays fresh by mixing it up, via rotating featured exhibits.
Rock Style
in 2000 spotlighted outfits worn by everyone from
Buddy Holly
to Sid Vicious and was the hall's first curatorial collaboration with another museum,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York. Currently featured is
Tommy: The Amazing Journey,
focusing on one of the earliest and most important rock operas.

Choosing Cleveland as a location was a source of national debate and even protest from rival cities. Public-relations ammunition in the battle included pioneering Cleveland rock radio station WMMS and disc jockey Allan Freed, who began tossing around the term rock 'n' roll and organizing concerts in the '50s, when rock was still known as "race" music.

Mesek says there is a rich history of band development in Cleveland. A Motown-era club called Leo's Casino, for example, was kind of a bellwether.

"People used to look at Leo's Casino for how an act would do nationally," Mesek says. "There's a heritage here. The people of Cleveland fought for it to be here, and they won the battle."

But Cleveland's prominence on the music scene seems to have faded into history even as the Rock Hall has boosted the city's profile for tourists.

"In the '70s, Cleveland was one of the biggest consumer markets for music and radio markets," Swanson says. "It was a huge thing. But now it's a ghost town for any of this stuff. No labels have offices here anymore. It seems kind of odd now that the Rock Hall's here. And people outside of Cleveland think it's odd."

Spurring development

The Rock Hall led to a rebirth in other ways, ushering in a period of downtown restoration around the new Jacobs Field baseball stadium. Downtown lofts are attracting a modest migration from the suburbs.

"We have been a hardworking, backbone-of-America kind of city, a blue-collar town, and the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a big win for us," Mesek says. "It was a moment of enormous civic pride."

Still, Clevelanders such as Jeff Herwick, bass player for the New Salem Witchhunters and a serious record collector (with 25,000 albums in his suburban basement), resent the fact that inductions are held in New York, cutting Cleveland out of the national spotlight.

"That rankles a lot of people," Herwick says. "It should be here. You need star power."

And local rockers say that while the hall holds allure for casual fans, some of its exhibits and displays seem superficial to professional and semiprofessional musicians. There's a feeling that the experience should be somehow grittier, somehow cooler. Subversive, maybe, like the art form that spawned it.

But for tourists, the $84 million, 150,000-square-foot Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is the gleaming futuristic centerpiece of Cleveland's North Coast Harbor on Lake Erie. Architect I.M. Pei, after a crash course in rock, said he intended to echo the music's energy in the structure.

The six-story building is the only attraction in all of Ohio deemed worthy of inclusion in Patricia Schultz's book One Thousand Places to See Before You Die, released two years ago.

In 1998, the Hall of Fame within the building was moved from a narrow space on the sixth floor to an expansive theater on the third floor to accommodate its burgeoning ranks of honorees. An artist is eligible for nomination 25 years after the release of his or her first recording.

Along with the reverently dim Hall of Fame corridor with its glow-in-the-dark musician signatures on the walls, memorabilia does hold an allure for many.

One of Mesek's favorite objects on exhibit is John Lennon's first passport.

"When he first left the U.K. to do his first gig in Hamburg, you see the stamp there," he says with a bit of awe in his voice. "When he left the U.K. to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, the stamp is there. This documents John Lennon's emergence as a rock icon."